Remembering George Harrison

Today would have been the 67th birthday of George Harrison, not everybody’s favorite Beatle, but yeah, he’s still ours and here is his last number one song: “I’ve Got My Mind Set on You.”

Our favorite Beatles songs where George is singing lead are: “I’m Happy Just to Dance with You” and “Do You Want to Know a Secret.”

George was known as the “Quiet Beatle.” He was also the youngest Beatle, being born on February 25, 1943. The three other Beatles, John, Paul and Ringo, were all born in 1940.

George first met Paul McCartney on a school bus en route to Liverpool Institute, where they were both attending school. Being inspired by skiffle king, Lonnie Donegan, George performed for a while with a skiffle group called the Rebels, with his brother, Pete and close friend, Arthur Kelly. After the Rebels broke up, Harrison began hanging around McCartney and Lennon while they played in their group, The Quarrymen. Initially, John Lennon had no interest in taking Harrison on but eventually became something of a mentor to George and in 1958, George became the group’s lead guitar.

Beatlemania was still a few years away. In this autobiography, I, Me, Mine, George Harrison compared it to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest:

“Beatlemania. I would never want that again. Really it’s awful but sometimes it was good, whatever … it’s like “Cuckoo’s Nest,” you know, where you are sane in the middle of something and they’re all crackers. You know, the guards and nurses and the government, everybody. There was definitely a point where it became obvious that we were not crackers but that all we had to do was come to town and people would all break the shop windows and the cops would all fall off the motor bikes.”

George came close to suffering the same fate as John Lennon in 1999, when deranged fan, Michael Abram, believing himself to be on a mission from God, broke into his home and attacked him with a knife. George’s quick-thinking wife, Olivia, hit Abram with a brass poker and a heavy table lamp, incapacitating the attacker. Abram had already inflicted a nearly fatal stab wound. George Harrison later described feeling his lung deflate at Abram’s court hearing: “There was a time during this violent struggle that I truly believed I was dying,” he said.

At the time of this attack, George had already been treated for cancer of the throat beginning in 1997 when he discovered a lump on his neck. In 2001, he again began a course of radiation treatment at Staten Island University Hospital in New York City for lung cancer. He would not recover this time and died at the age of 58 on November 29, 2001.

Martin Scorsese has a documentary “Living in the Material World: George Harrison,” which is due out this year, which reportedly includes never-before-seen footage and interviews with Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono, Eric Clapton, Eric Idle, Phil Spector and Tom Petty. The film will follow George Harrison’s life from Liverpool, Beatlemania, his journeys to India and will explore the influence Indian culture had on his music, as well as George’s importance as a Beatle — and no doubt, as a guitar player.

George Harrison was named the 21st greatest guitarist of all time in a list of Top 100 Guitar Players of All Time by Rolling Stone magazine.